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BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

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Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#131

Post by cameronh90 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #5

Lidars come down in price ~40x. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop... Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free. Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision…

If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely?

Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way.

Personally I don’t buy the argument that it has to be one or the other as Tesla have claimed, but between the two, vision is the only one that captures all the data sufficient to drive a car.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#132

Post by jenebiiit »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #121
pyrolistical wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not either lifar or regular cameras. Use both and combine the information to exceed the humans

What proportion is camera data and what is LIDAR? Must be solved problem and something you should buy already? Right?

[dead]

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#133

Post by CamperBob2 »

addaon wrote: post #129
CamperBob2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. Look at how dozens of GPS satellites share the same frequency without stepping on each others' toes, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_code Like GPS, LIDAR can be jammed or spoofed by intentional actors, of course. That part's not so easy to hand-wave away, but someone who wants to screw with road traffic will certainly…

> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer…

I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.

Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#134

Post by kadoban »

iknowstuff wrote: post #21
refulgentis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to take on this challenge: the article they linked shows the cost add for LIDAR (+$130) -- -- but I'm not sure how to get data on ex. how much Tesla is charged for a Nvidia whatever or what compute Waymo has -- My personal take is Waymo uses cameras too so maybe we have to assume the worst case, +full cost of lidar / +$130

Tesla uses their own chips. Chips which you can’t skip by using lidar because you still need to make decisions based on vision. A sparse distance cloud is not enough

In what sense does Tesla use their own chips?

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#135

Post by addaon »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #133
addaon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, LIDAR is relatively trivial to render immune to interference from other LIDARs. For rotating pulsed lidar, this really isn't the case. It's possible, but certainly not trivial. The challenge is that eye safety is determined by the energy in a pulse, but detection range is determined by the power of a pulse, driving towards minimum pulse width for a given lens size. This width is under 10 ns, and leaning closer…

I think we may have had this discussion before, but from an engineering perspective, I don't buy it. For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power. Large numbers of bits per unit of time are what it takes to make two sequences correlate (or not), and large numbers of bits per unit of time are not a problem in this business. Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in l…

> For coding, the number of pulses per second is what matters, not power.

I haven't seen a system that does anti-interference across multiple pulses, as opposed to by shaping individual pulses. (I've seen systems that introduce random jitter across multiple pulses to de-correlate interference, but that's a bit different.) The issue is you really do get a hell of a lot of data out of a single pulse, and for interesting objects (thin poles, power lines) there's not a lot of correlation between adjacent pulses -- you can't always assume properties across multiple pulses without having to throw away data from single data-carrying pulses.

Edit: Another way of saying this -- your revisit rate to a specific point of interference is around 20 Hz. That's just not a lot of bits per unit time.

> Signal power limits imposed by eye safety requirements will kick in long after noise limits imposed by Shannon-Hartley.

I can believe this is true for FMCW lidar, but I know it to be untrue for pulsed lidar. Perhaps we're discussing different systems?

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#136

Post by JumpCrisscross »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #127
bluGill wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People die in car crashes all the time. Self driving can kill a lot of people and still be vastly better than humans.

But who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?

> who gets the ticket when a self-driving car is at fault?

Whoever was in control. This isn’t some weird legal quagmire anymore, these cars are on the road.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#137

Post by gbnwl »

cameronh90 wrote: post #131
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #5

Lidars come down in price ~40x. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/20/lidars-wicked-cost-drop... Meanwhile visible light based tech is going up in price due to competing with ai on the extra gpu need while lidar gets the range/depth side of things for free. Ideally cars use both but if you had to choose one or the other for cost you’d be insane to choose vision over lidar. Musk made an ill timed decision to go vision…

If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely? Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way. Personally I don’t buy the argument t…

Sorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#138

Post by JumpCrisscross »

general1465 wrote: post #74
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between anti-Musk sentiment, competition in self driving and the proven track record of Lidar, I think we’ll start seeing jurisdictions from Europe to New York and California banning camera-only self-driving beyond Level 3.

Nah, you don't need to ban anything. Just force the rule, that if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system.

> if company sells self driving, they are also taking full liability for any damages of this system

This is basically what we have (for reasonable definitions of full).

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#139

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #120
SapporoChris wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe traffic lights currently use three bulbs, red, yellow and green. Even without color a computer system can easily determine when each light is lit. If there are single bulbs displaying red, green and yellow please give clear examples.

How about turn signal vs brake lights?

> How about turn signal vs brake lights?

Potentially as extraneous as range to a surface that a camera can’t tell apart from background.

More to the point, everyone but Tesla is doing cameras plus Lidar. It’s increasingly looking like the correct bet.

Re: BYD's cheapest electric cars to have Lidar self-driving tech

#140

Post by ares623 »

gbnwl wrote: post #137
cameronh90 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to choose one over the other, it has to be vision surely? Even ignoring various current issues with Lidar systems that aren’t fundamental limitations, large amounts of road infrastructure is just designed around vision and will continue to be for at least another few decades. Lidar just fundamentally can’t read signs, traffic lights or road markings in a reliable way. Personally I don’t buy the argument t…

Sorry if this is obvious, but are there actually any systems that "choose one over the other"? My impression's always been it was either vision + LIDAR, or vision alone. Are there any examples of LIDAR alone?

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